Walter’s book is not just about ’s founder; it’s a very engaging look at why his company is successful. And in it, she hits on something that many of the other books seem to have missed: the power of diversity in innovation. I’m not talking about demographic diversity alone. Please don’t get me wrong—demographic diversity is absolutely vital to innovation. And efforts to make companies more demographically diverse still have a long way to go.

But, building on the knowledge that diversity is power, I propose expanding the definition of “diversity.” Not as a counterpoint to the demographic meaning, but as a flourish upon it. Musicians call such things embellishments. Maybe you’ve heard jazz performers and others add their own riffs to the music they’re exploring.

In Think Like Zuck, Walter posits five “musts” for business success: passion, purpose, people, product, partnership. It was her thought-provoking chapters on people and partnerships that made me really sit up and start thinking—about diversity and about why we need to think about it.

Because of Zuckerberg’s passion and smarts, Facebook was doing fairly well nearly from its start. But didn’t go into orbit until Zuckerberg picked Sheryl Sandberg to be his COO. Walters writes:

She had a completely different style from his. I think their differences are what make the Zuckerberg-Sandberg duo such an extraordinary team. They complement each other very well. What Mark lacks in experience, Sheryl brings to the table in abundance. When he doesn’t feel like stepping into the limelight, she steps in for him masterfully. The difference in age, as well as gender, contributes various perspectives and capabilities.

“Yeah,” I thought, “that makes a lot of sense. So why don’t more companies get this? Isn’t it obvious?” Nailing the point, she quotes Leslie Bradshaw of JESS3 (a social media company that’s worked on projects that included Nike, MTV, Samsung, NASA, American Express, Twitter, ESPN, Google):

In our partnership, Jesse [Thomas] is the yang, and . . . I have enough yin to balance it out. If you look beyond our personalities, the fact that our genders are different also adds diversity. The perspective I bring as a woman is very different from what he brings as a man, and that helps balance out the way we hire, the way we treat our employees, and the way we approach strategies when we execute for clients.

“Of course” I shouted (luckily, I was alone HA). Ofcourse diversity allows you to do more—think more, think differently, think better! It seems self-evident, really—yet so hard to get a lot of managers and CEOs to risk hiring or involving people who are different from them, who do things differently, think differently. “Everyone needs to be talking about this!" As you can see, I was pretty fired up.

2) It’s Been Proven: Two Brains (and Personalities) Are Better Than One

Inspired by Walter’s book, I read Hutch Carpenter’s article on cloudave.com, pacing back and forth attempting to find past threads of stuff that inspires my thinking:

A key aspect of the next generation of innovation is the ability to tap a much larger set of minds in pursuit of valuable ideas. . . . The historic method of innovation relied exclusively on a designated few. [“So true!”] . . . Diversity is the key element here. That is, engaging a broad set of different perspectives to generate something better than one could do individually. . . . Cognitive and heuristics diversity—that’s what benefits innovation. People who see things in a different way, and bring a different practice to solving problems.

“Good, good, yes,” I thought, still talking to myself, “of course—put people together, you get more ideas. Like one plus one, right?”

Not quite: it’s one of this kind plus one of another kind. Hutch goes on to cite a study by Ron Burt of U. Chicago, finding that “people with more diverse sources of information generated consistently better ideas.”

So, not just more sources. More diverse sources.

3) E Pluribus . . .(What?! "Out of Many . . . ")

Then I found out something totally cool. Are you ready for this? Group diversity leads to better innovation than a genius inventor (or an isolated group) working alone—even when s/he gets input from diverse sources. Although the “lone inventor” may come up with great innovations—okay, we’re all thinking Alexander Graham Bell—it’s less likely that will happen than with communities of diverse thinkers who are free to explore ideas.

It’s true: Zuckerberg didn’t work alone. And neither did Alexander Graham Bell. Facebook and the telephone may have been visions of "lone inventors," but those visions became world-changing products only because Zuckerberg and Bell worked well with others who thought differently from them.

As Ekaterina Walter makes abundantly clear, Mark Zuckerberg, along with many others, has created a platform more powerful than any since the invention of the printing press for letting our voices be heard. Is this social community?

Okay, then . . . let’s use that platform to create a new world of work. All of us, together, make up a diverse collection of talents, personalities, styles, backgrounds, brains, ideas, experience. A diverse community—an orchestra, you might say. Let’s start riffing, together . . . This is a place that not only makes me happy .... but may just inform the future of work.